As more users begin to take advantage of businesses that use the internet to describe, market, sell, and deliver products and services, the performance of web sites becomes an issue of greater importance. Depending on the type of product or service that is the subject of the web-based commerce, the challenges to providing rapid or even real-time responses to consumers can be great. For example, in providing insurance product information via the web, a web site should efficiently gather consumer information and process that information to provide insurance product rate quotes.
Conventional processes for calculating an insurance rate for a product can be complicated and may require mathematical expressions that depend on detailed product information, consumer information, rating factors from look-up tables, and other relevant information. These processes become even more complicated when calculating rates for a variety of different products, e.g., automobiles, houses, watches, guns, etc., at the same time.
Mathematical expressions and data are typically encoded into the programming for an insurance product application that gathers information from a consumer and returns rate quote information and perhaps other types of information to the consumer. However, in order to efficiently and accurately calculate insurance product rates, the insurance product application may not obtain all of the product information from the users. Product information from the users may lead to an incorrect valuation of the product and subsequently to an improper insurance policy being offered for that product. Also, the process of modifying an insurance policy using the insurance product application can become cumbersome and inefficient when it is later determined that a product conduction has changed or does not match the condition originally stated by the user.
Accordingly, what is needed is a product value calculation system that is scalable and allows for efficient and accurate calculation of product rates so that they can be returned to a consumer requesting such a rate in a short amount of time or even in real-time.